


a prescription to die

by Casylum



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 09:10:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11078481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casylum/pseuds/Casylum
Summary: And Watson? She wasn't what he expected. Wasn't what anyone expected. He really would have to ask his sister where she managed to find a serial killer with principles, especially one with such a convenient day job.





	a prescription to die

**Author's Note:**

> RODERIGO: It is silliness to live when to live is torment,and/then have we a prescription to die when death is our physician.
> 
> —OTHELLO, Act I, Scene iii

Joan Watson wasn’t what he was expecting.

To be honest, he wasn’t expecting anything, as his father (or his sister, he was never quite sure who was in charge of his care these last few years) hadn’t deigned to tell him that he was hiring a sober companion, much less who she was. Or that she was a she.

When she showed up on his front step, foot tapping slightly and face impassive, he simply stared for a few moments, then held out a hand.

“Sherlock Holmes,” he said, shaking the slim collection of bones and tendons she offered him. “And you are?”

“Joan Watson,” she replied briskly, eyes meeting his solidly. “Sober companion. I’m guessing, by your expression, that your sister didn’t tell you about me?”

_So it had been Myra_ , he thought briefly, then pasted a smile on his face, one that generally placated the people around him into believing that he did, indeed, care about the trivialities of their lives.

“She did not,” he confirmed, then stepped back slightly, waving a hand behind him. “Please, come in.”

Joan smiled, and walked past Sherlock into the house, trailing a mix of cinnamon, coffee, and something very akin to bleach. He watched her look around, closing the door only when she turned back to look at him from the center of the empty space he’d dubbed the living room, despite its lack of any significant amount of furniture.

“How long are you going to be here?” he asked, knowing he was being abrupt, almost approaching rude, and not caring overly much.

“Six weeks,” Joan replied, voice showing no hint that she was offended by his behavior. Point in her favor, as not many people managed that, front or no. “More if Ms. Holmes thinks you need it, or if I do.”

“Ms. Holmes?” Sherlock laughed, and walked past her to flop into one of the few chairs in the room. He looked over at Joan after she spun to keep her eyes on her face, and grinned slightly. “She know you call her that? No matter, I’m sure I’ll be able to keep myself from causing your time with me to be extended.”

Joan’s face remained impassive, clearly still taking his measure. “I’ll need a room,” she said after a moment. “As your companion, I’ll be with you every second of every day until time’s up.”

Sherlock grimaced internally, keeping the grin firmly on his face. That might...complicate things. Not too much, or he’d never have let Joan in the brownstone, but enough. He sat up, leaning forward in the chair.

“There’s a room upstairs,” he said, nodding towards the flight of stairs that ran up one wall. “Pay no heed to the stains on the wall, I’m currently in the process of fixing the source.”

Joan raised an eyebrow, but said nothing, just turned and left, presumably to get her things from the car he’d seen her climb out of before coming to the door.

After she’d gone upstairs with two suitcases that wouldn’t look out of place in one of those period dramas Mother had been so fond of, Sherlock went into the kitchen and set to fixing a pot of coffee, resigning himself to drinking it out of a soup bowl due to an unexpected shortage of clean mugs.

The actions were mindless, ritualistic, even. Soothing, if he looked at it too closely, which he was prone to doing. The situation he currently found himself in was completely his own fault, and he couldn’t blame Myra for trying to shove him back onto as much of the straight and narrow as she could manage. She’d always been a bit of a meddling bitch.

His cellphone buzzed from his back pocket, and he set down the carafe of water he’d just been about to dump into the machine and fished his phone out, flipping it over and turning the screen on. “ _Capt. Gregson: Got a body, seems like your kind of deal. Corner of East 23rd &..._” the message read, before cutting off. The snick of the display unlocking came in tandem with the sound of Joan’s footsteps coming down the stairs, and he looked up briefly to see her standing in the doorway, clearly waiting for him to say something. He glanced down to read the rest of the text (“ _...Lexington. Quickly would be nice._ ”), then met her eyes.

“What are your feelings on crime scenes?”

~~~

For the first several minutes, he’ll admit that he lost track of her, too caught up in the rush of investigating and stretching mental muscles that too often felt like they were going slack. There were tiny scuff marks in the tile to be analyzed, blood spatter trajectories to be calculated, and long strings of overly intelligent words to be spoken to the police officers around him.

Once he’d finished with the preliminaries were over, he found Joan standing off to one side, lip curled slightly as she scanned the scene.

“Uncomfortable?” he asked, sidling up to her side. “Odd for a surgeon to be queasy at the sight of blood, but I guess there’s an exception for everything.”

She jumped, and Sherlock nodded to himself. She had been shocked by that, even if just a little. It restored some of the ego that had been lost by her complete indifference back at the brownstone. Petty of him, but he was capable of being anything if he needed to be.

Joan slanted a glance up at him. “How did you know that?” she said, voice still calm. He gritted his teeth slightly. They were supposed to be in awe, or at least slightly annoyed that he’d ferreted out things he wasn’t supposed to. _Whatever_ , he thought to himself, _she still jumped_.

“Your hands,” Sherlock said shortly. “Callouses in the right places, but still smoother than they would be under normal circumstances.” “Mmm,” she hummed, watching the crime scene techs zip up what was left of the former owner of the apartment they stood in, seemingly disinterested in what he was saying.

“Also Google,” he admitted after the techs had left. “In the cab on the way over. Not too terribly many Asian women with your name in New York.”

“Bit stalkerish, don’t you think?” the woman under discussion noted, before starting to pick her way towards the door. “Especially since I’m right here.” She looked back, a smile curving across her face. “Ever think of just asking?”

Sherlock stood in the middle of the room as she left to stand in the hall, rendered speechless. Something tugged at his mind, however, something more than the subtly infuriating habits of his new companion. He shifted his position over to a chair that had been shoved slightly out of the deep grooves in the carpet that indicated its habitual position, and breathed in deeply.

There, just at the edge of recognizable odor, he caught a whiff of something, a blend of scents that remained lightly on the air: cinnamon, coffee, and a hint of bleach. He looked at the door frame thoughtfully, pieces shifting in his head, edges twisting, trying to fit together in a pattern he wasn’t sure was plausible, let alone the truth of the matter.

Either way, Ms. Watson was hiding rather more than she was letting on.

~~~

A week later, Sherlock was sitting in front of his fireplace, a multitude of papers tacked to the wall and Angus sitting in judgement on a small table to his left. He’d gone down every possible avenue he could think of, led Gregson to bring in men who, by all rights, should have done the deed.

But they hadn’t.

And so he kept circling back around to the same conclusion he’d begun to reach at the victim’s apartment that first day. The impact of bare feet against floorboards brought him out of his contemplation, and he twisted around to see Joan leaning up against the door frame, arms crossed as she surveyed the fruits of his labor.

“Any luck?” she asked distractedly, eyes tracing the lines of red string he’d put up, connecting certain articles to others so he didn’t have to hold the pattern in his mind any more than necessary.

“None,” Sherlock said, turning back to the wall as well. “Mr. Dubois was a well-liked, responsible New Yorker with no next of kin except for an ex-wife on the West Coast who couldn’t have made it here and back, even if she does have some sort of motive. No one seems to have wanted to kill him, even the people who should have.”

Joan snorted. “They never do.”

“What was that?” Sherlock said, forcing his voice to be as distracted as hers, eyes firmly ahead.

“Guys like him,” she said, with a rustle that suggested she’d indicated the evidence spread in front of them with one hand. “No one ever seems to think they’re worthy of killing. Pretty women, sure, because men are assholes. People with something to hide, something to lose, they end up dead all the time.” Joan trailed off, leaving them both in silence.

“What about Mr. Dubois?” he asked after a moment. “If he’s so...unkillable, as you say, why was he murdered?”

“Asking me to do your job?” Joan said, amused. “I thought you said, and I quote, that I was ‘good to talk at, not to discuss with.’”

“I may have been... _wrong_ ,” he said delicately, trying not to tense noticeably, highly aware of the fact that she was behind him. “So? What’re your thoughts?”

“I think,” she said slowly, “and mind you, this is just what I think, but I think Mr. Dubois was less bland than he’s led us to believe. I think he might have had a son once, one who came into the ER more than most kids. I think he might have been one of those people who knew that if he smiled hard enough, and paid enough, he’d get what he wanted, always.

“And,” she said flatly, as Sherlock finally turned around to look at her, face set in an unforgiving mask, “I think he got what he deserved.”

They considered each other for a very long while after that, neither breaking the silence that developed and spread itself through the room.

“Tea?” Sherlock finally offered, pushing himself off the floor and turning his back on the papers detailing Dubois’ life, papers that hadn’t given him the final piece of the puzzle, and never would.

Joan smiled, breaking the mask, and nodded slightly, turning into the shadows of the hall and moving towards the kitchen.

Well then.

He couldn’t say he was expecting _that_ , no one ever expects their sober companion to all but admit that they murdered someone in cold blood, but still. He wasn’t surprised, not at all, even though that particular revelation should have worried him.

~~~

A few hours after tea, Sherlock pushed back from his computer and leaned back in his chair, fingers lacing behind his head as his eyes studied the ceiling.

He’d just gone through Joan Watson’s surgery log, dating from the time she’d started as a resident at New York Presbyterian up to the time she’d lost a patient and left the hospital to become a sober companion. What he’d found was that over twenty people that either she’d treated, or had been vaguely associated with her patients (enough, at least, to have come into the ER at one point or another during their stay), had ended up dead in one way or another at some point during the last seven years.

He doubted anyone else would be able to put it together, the thread tying the dead together was too thin, too fragile to build up a case, but Watson’s words earlier in the day made the connections as solid as he could make them. “Oh Myra, what are you up to?” he whispered into the empty room, knowing that it wasn’t a coincidence that she’d managed to find what was most likely the only sober companion in New York who happened to moonlight as a serial killer, and one with principles, no less.

Unsurprisingly, the room didn’t answer.

~~~

The first few weeks after his discovery, Sherlock didn't say anything, finding it preferable to keep quiet and allow Watson to carry on as she was. And it was quite easy too, to ignore the elephant in the room in the shape of a murderer who looked like she might fall over if breathed on too hard by Mike Tyson.

That was, until they got a call from Gregson that left Sherlock standing over a corpse that smelled ever so slightly of that signature mix of cinnamon, coffee, and bleach, with Watson looking green next to him.

He knew in his bones that the blonde woman who seemed to be missing a large portion of her throat was on the list of patients he'd gathered when he'd first heard of Watson's extracurricular activities, and he also knew that the last time he'd been unable to produce the perpetrator of a crime was Joan's previous mark. Much more of this, and Gregson would put it together himself, if only to suggest that Sherlock knew more that he was letting in, and certainly protecting a criminal besides.

Once he'd set the good Captain on a suitable wild goose chase, even as he questioned his decision to let the murderer in their midst walk relatively free, Sherlock said in a low voice, "I can't tell if you're truly that squeamish, or you just don't looking at your own handiwork."

She jumped, and Sherlock spent a moment being slightly embarrassed at the spurt of pride that shot through him at surprising her.

"Is this really the place," she said, voice equally low, and eyes fixed on the splatters of blood that painted the wall opposite of where they stood.

"It's as good a place as any," Sherlock responded. "Better than some, actually. Some people don't like it when I talk shop at the table. Makes it difficult for digestion."

Joan snorted softly. "Then maybe they shouldn't eat long pig. I hear it's hell on the stomach." Sherlock started in what he hoped wasn't an obvious manner. "Is that what she did then?" he asked after a moment.

Joan just smiled at him in a manner that admitted nothing, and walked over to Detective Bell, who was motioning them over to an ice chest one of the uniforms had just pulled out of one of the bedroom closets.

He wouldn't be lying when he said he'd kill to figure out how she knew of the woman's proclivities after a thirty minute hospital visit, he admitted to himself, and then went over to be suitably surprised and horrified at the contents of the uniform's discovery.

**Author's Note:**

> Written in Winter 2013.


End file.
